Jack Cohen's Blog about Israel and other daily amusements

Trump Disappoints

It is not unusual for any candidate for election to break his campaign promises, but for Pres. Trump these could be serious. After all he has little support from the coastal democratic elites and the liberal media. Some Jews rallied to his side because he offered such an apparent opposition to the policies of Pres. Obama. Two promises particularly have galvanized pro-Israel support for Trump, the unequivocal statement that he would move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital Jerusalem, and the promise that he would not pressure Israel into accepting conditions that were against its interests in order to force a so-called peace agreement. On both counts Trump has disappointed these followers, supporters that he can ill afford to lose.

Trump has opted to sign the waiver provided for every 6 months by the law passed by Congress in 1995 that would transfer the Embassy to Jerusalem. It is up to the President to decide whether or not it is time to make this transfer. I don’t think when the Bill was signed into law that anyone envisaged that it would take so long to be implemented. Each President has used the waiver option to bring pressure on Israel, rather than take the straightforward move and put the US Embassy in the self-declared capital of the country, as it is in every other country that the US has diplomatic relations with. This is an anomaly resulting from anti-Israel bias from the Arabs on the US. It should stop and we thought that Trump was the man to do so. Evidently we were wrong about him.

Another area where Trump has disappointed his supporters is the “Wall” that he promised to build across the Mexican border. So far not much has happened in that direction, and certainly there is no sign that Mexico will pay for its construction. Trump has made initial moves to have the US pay for part of it, but so far little has been done. Nevertheless, the attempts by the Trump Administration to change the whole immigration policy, and stop immigrants from six Muslim countries where there is extensive terrorist violence, certainly make sense, and the Government is challenging the attempts to stop this initiative in the courts.

Finally, Trump has kept his promise to abrogate the Paris Climate Agreement, that was not a treaty. Although we may argue about the effects of global warming and to what extent it is man-made, there is no doubt that this agreement, personally approved by former Pres. Obama without the involvement of Congress, was a bad deal for the US. It required the US and other Western countries to make contributions of billions of dollars to under-developed countries (like China)! Getting out of this agreement was a promise that Trump fulfilled.